Delivery of large quantities of time critical data from a wireless transmitter creates a unique set of problems. Examples of time critical data that is generated in large quantities can include audio and video data, multimedia data, simulation data, logging data and others. When the term video transmission or multimedia data is used in this application it will refer to both video and audio transmissions together. Multimedia could also include gesture data, motion data as is used by remote robot control for computer-assisted operations on patients. In the world of large quantity time critical data the majority of solutions are focused on delivery of data transmissions to wireless receivers, not from wireless transmitters. Typically time critical data becomes irrelevant if it does not reach its intended destination in seconds or sub-seconds. When transmitting over wireless networks the ability to achieve this goal is extremely difficult.
Typically these wireless enabled devices include: wireless PDAs, Smartphones and laptops with tethered RF receivers. Utilizing RF signals through a wireless network is well known including systems such as: General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), Enhanced Data GSM Environment (EDGE), Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (W-CMDA) or many other third generation or fourth generation solutions. Other wireless receivers include Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) products that are based on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' (IEEE) 802.11 standards (WiFi) receivers, or a newer class of wireless technologies called Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (Wi-MAX) and Long Term Evolution (LTE) solutions that offer even greater throughputs to solve problems such as television on demand and video conferencing on demand. All of the above solutions fail to deal with the problem of wireless transmitters that transmit large volumes of data that is also time critical, for example data transmissions of either normal definition (720 by 576), high definition (1920 by 1080), or ultra high definition (7680 by 4320) video transmissions. The major limitation of all current radio technologies is the up-channel, leaving the mobile communication device, is typically smaller than the down-channel, arriving at the mobile communication device. With this kind of unbalanced data throughput the ability to transmit large volumes of time critical data on the up-channel is a very difficult problem.
In the field of data communications it is known that multiple data channels can be used to augment data throughput and solve some problem of delivering reliable, high quality data transmissions, such as video data. The paper “Distributed Video Streaming with Forward Error Correction”, by Thinh Nguyen and Avideh Zakhor; proposes one such method. An approach known in this field includes opening multiple paths and adjusting data rates based on the throughput actually reaching the receiver. This approach typically focuses on extremely specific calculations to maximize efficiency and Forward Error Correction (FEC) through a control channel to adjust the data rates per channel. These types of solutions generally fail over wireless network topologies as a result of the many anomalies that abound in a wireless medium. Moving wireless transmitters experience problems such as dynamic fading, dead zones, dramatic latency differences, echo effects, the ability to receive but not transmit data, RF interference, immediate channel loss and channel re-allocation to voice only cell phone users.
In accordance with the problems described above a system and method of using multiple paths to solve the problem of streaming large volume data transmission over a wireless network is disclosed.